It's the Little Things

 

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. had quite an expanded universe (though, of course, that term didn't exist in the 1960s and there was a lot less worry about continuity between different media). Aside from the TV show, there was a very successful series of paperbacks and an U.N.C.L.E. magazine that ran for 22 issues. Gold Key Comics published an U.N.C.L.E. comic book.  

Today, we are taking a peek at one of the many often excellent crime and spy stories that ran in the magazine in addition to U.N.C.L.E. novellas. "How the Cookie Crumbled..." by Ed Lacy, appeared in the May 1966 issue.

It's a fun story, written in the form of a letter a man named Lenny is writing to his wife. Lenny, currently on the lam, is explaining to his wife that he's always been a part-time criminal. She didn't know it--but every so often, Lenny and his two friends (Tom and Charlie) would pull a low-key burglary for extra spending cash. They never stole anything but cash--no merchandise that could be traced. And since their crimes were always minor, the cops never expended a lot of energy trying to identify and catch them.

But that's all gone to pot. Tom hit it big at the race track and took a cruise from New York to Nassau. During the trip, he came up with a clever plan for robbing the purser's office. And the plan really is pretty clever. In fact, most of the story consists of Tom explaining the plan.

Which is what makes the story itself clever. We know from what Lenny tells his wife that something goes badly wrong with the robbery. But the plan seems airtight and, initially, the execution of it seems to go without a hitch.

So we are reading the entire story knowing that something will go awry, but we don't know what.  The story is constructed expertly enough to generate a lot of suspense with the reader. Something goes wrong--but what? 

I don't want to hint at what it is, but it's a fair play story with the seeds of the thieves' downfall hidden within the tale. "When the Cookie Crumbles..." is a lot of fun. You can read it yourself HERE.